2021 - Ethical-Reparative Reconfigurations of The Literary Today PDF

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
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Volume 23 (2021) Issue 2 Article 7
Ethical-Reparative Reconfigurations of the Literary Today
André Cechinel
Universidade do Extremo Sul Catarinense - Brazil
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Purdue University Press ©Purdue University
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, the peer-reviewed, full-text, and open-access learned journal in the
humanities and social sciences, publishes new scholarship following tenets of the discipline of comparative literature
and the field of cultural studies designated as "comparative cultural studies." In addition to the publication of articles,
the journal publishes review articles of scholarly books and publishes research material in its Library Series.
Publications in the journal are indexed in the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (Chadwyck-
Healey), the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (Thomson Reuters ISI), the Humanities Index (Wilson), Humanities
International Complete (EBSCO), the International Bibliography of the Modern Language Association of America, and
Scopus (Elsevier). The journal is affiliated with the Purdue University Press monograph series of Books in Comparative
Cultural Studies. Contact: <clcweb@purdue.edu>
Volume 23 Issue 2 (June 2021) Article 7

André Cechinel,
"Ethical Reparative Reconfigurations of the Literary Today"
<http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol23/iss2/7>
Contents of CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 23.2 (2021)

Special Issue: A Return to the Bad Old Times. Ed. Fabio Akcelrud Durão and Fernando Urueta
<http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol23/iss2/>
Abstract: This essay aims to debate the evidence of an ethical-reparative function for literature and
literary studies today. Therefore, it is divided into two fundamental moments, two argumentative
channels that, without a totalizing intention, point out the general perspective of the current, changing,
stuation. On the one hand, the literature of the 20th century is presented through the image of a
supposed negativity or radical intransitivity, capable of “undoing the work” in its “aesthetics of
suppression.” On the other hand, from an introductory debate around some of the places of transitivity
envisioned for literature at the beginning of the 21th century, the literary is now conceived as an ethical-
reparative field, responsible, among others, for “giving visibility,” “remembering,” “repairing damage,”
“comforting,” etc. This transition results in a notion of growing discomfort in relation to social artifacts
that, even in the artistic field, cannot be reconciled with a utilitarianism that cannot preserve anything
intact, not even literature.
André Cechinel, "Ethical Reparative Reconfigurations of the Literary Today" page 2 of 11
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 23.2 (2021): <http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol23/iss2/7>
André CECHINEL,
Ethical Reparative Reconfigurations of the Literary Today
Introduction
A critical device repeatedly used in the last century—and even before that—the announcement of the
end or crisis of literature constitutes, as we know, one of the most important discursive resources both
for literary criticism and for the activity of the writers themselves. This is so true that the confirmation
of the partiality of this announcement, seen as excessive and apocalyptic, proves, in turn, to be no less
constant and present than the phenomenon to be refuted. In other words, if, on the one hand, the end
of literature or literary reading is problematized, envisioned or prophesied by critics like George Steiner,
Alfonso Berardinelli, Tzvetan Todorov, Antoine Compagnon, among others, no less numerous are those
who, on the other hand, set out to declare that the diagnosis of the end or crisis is not only long familiar,
but also serves to feed or revive the movements of literature that ensure an apparently perennial
survival. In Brazil, as an example of the theoretical debate that understands “end” and “crisis” as
creative strategies for the literary space, one should mention the recent studies by Marcos Siscar.
In any case, if we think in terms of a continuum, in which the unlikely decline or disappearance of
literature occupies one of the extremes, it is certain that the frequent announcement of its death is
located at a less peripheral point, and refers, above all, to the perception that something has changed,
that a particular form or register, previously taken for granted, no longer accurately reflects the
fundamental operations of an object that remains, however, without an essence, informed
retrospectively by its later and uncertain course. Instead of “end,” “death,” “decline” or “disappearance,”
then, we should refer to “mutation indices” (Perrone-Moisés), signs of the crossing from one literary
regime to another, the loss of contemporaneity of a certain definition, or the passage of an appreciation
or social function to a new phase, role or situation that significantly updates the conceptual framework.
Leyla Perrone-Moises’ book, Mutations of Literature in the 21st Century, deals precisely with this theme,
that is to say, removing the idea of “death” or “end” of literature from its apocalyptic-decadentist sphere,
that of the extreme point of the continuum, but, at the same time, signaling a moment of “mutations,”
transformations - technological, economic, cultural, institutional, etc.—that change its “nature.”
This essay indicates one of these possible “mutation indices,” which could be formulated, in general,
in terms of a gradual discredit or disuse of the idea of “intransitivity,” “uselessness” or “negativity” of
literature—traits often understood as radical and political throughout the 20th century—in the name of
a growing “ethical-reparative” pragmatism according to which literary artifacts should directly affect
reality, drawing us closer to “other” beings (humans, animals, nature, etc.), teaching us to live better
and to have self-confidence, presenting us with the past silenced by the winners of official history, in
short, “doing what is good.” In the book Réparer le Monde, Alexandre Gefen (17) sums it up as follows:
“in the beginning of the 21st century, literature is no longer an end in itself, but rather a powerful social
or symbolic device that operates on consciences and hearts.” What Gefen calls a “therapeutic” turn,
therefore, concerns a desire for transitivity, the task of removing literature from the domain reserved
for the supposed aristocracy of “the elect”—an expression repeated at various points in his book—in
order to restore it to the use of common individuals: “literature [...] today, then, becomes a medicine
for the soul” (16).
In order to introduce the argument concerning this transition of literature from intransitive to an
“ethical” and “repairing” impulse, capable of healing hearts, souls, biographies and stories, this essay is
divided into two moments. First, from the reconstitution of decisive aspects of the architecture of
destruction or fictional exhaustion presented by Dominique Rabaté, and characteristic of 20th century
literature, the purpose is to expose an image of the literary as subtractive, corrosive, and negative
writing, capable of erasing, suppressing, making disappear, and, fundamentally, violating the literary
work and its traditional categories. Then, visiting different phenomena associated with the “therapeutic
turn”—such as the empire of autofictions, autobiographies, biographies, and other ways of writing and
revealing oneself; the significant presence and circulation of volumes with declared political and
interventional purposes, which aim to “give visibility,” “remember,” “do justice,” “repair damages,”
“comfort” etc.; the growth of “memory studies” (Durão and Tinti), and the “ethical turn” in literary
studies; and, finally, the logic of means and ends that instrumentalizes and “therapeutizes” the teaching
of literature in the new Brazilian National Common Core (BNCC)—the intention is to point out the ethical-
reparative reconfigurations of the literary today. As a conclusion, one can notice an alignment between
literature—or literary studies—and the need to justify transitively, pragmatically, and utilitarianly the
ethical-political and institutional place of its objects. Likewise, the so-called narcissistic and autophagic
society—society of competition, depression and “self-exhaustion”—unable to directly oppose the
violence of contemporary spectacle, acts in order to convert artistic objects and other residues of
intransitivity into positive therapy as a reintegrating element.
As in the case of other goods, the tendencies that regulate not only the modes of theorization, but
also the production of cultural artifacts tend to migrate from the international metropolises—in this case,
mainly France and the United States—to the periphery of the globe, often with a certain time delay and
revealing adaptive corruptions. Thus, the second section of this essay, which seeks to investigate the
increasingly present idea of “utility” and “applicability” in the field of literature and literary studies, often
resorts to examples taken from the Brazilian theoretical-literary context, a country where certain general
formulations assume specific developments capable of indicating important distortions, eventually
nonexistent or difficult to be identified in other contexts.
Undoing the Notion of Literary “Work”

In his book Vers une Littérature de L’Épuisement, D. Rabaté defends the thesis that the 20th century
literature is marked by the recurrent appearance of works—such as those by Kafka, Beckett, Blanchot,
Camus—that envision a poetics of exhaustion, disappearance, rarefaction, and, ultimately, death itself.
These are narratives that, in the face of the catastrophes of the 20th century and the apparent
explanatory insufficiency of the mythical, religious, philosophical, and scientific discourses of modernity,
turn to the staging of a profound metaphysical, linguistic, and existential abandonment, now converted
into an aesthetic procedure. Orphaned characters, without a name, or whose name is just an acronym,
without biography, without history, without past; plots without beginning, without linear development,
with no evident outcome; spaces without identity, without landscape, undifferentiated, without memory,
without location; a diffuse time, eternally present, without descriptive and enlightening projections or
setbacks; a groping language, whose unstable referents are limited to referring to new signifiers, in an
agonizing slide and with no promise of redemption, canceling authorship, properties, origins and
destinations. All of this is part of the 20th century literary scene, not exclusively, of course, but at least
in a constant or even dominant way, as summarized by Rabaté:
Exhaustion is the aesthetic program of a certain period of literature to which we may no longer belong. [...]
The novelist's imagination seems to be mobilized in a different way, less in the sense of visualizing places or
characters, according to their customs or physical traits, and more of discovering the unique trait of this
disincarnated discourse. The fiction effort lies in this discourse, which, in turn, demands a lot from us. (Rabaté,
Vers 11, 18).
This “disincarnated discourse” is, strictly speaking, both an expression of the exhaustion of the stable
scheme of genres and forms dictated by the representative regimes that have regulated literature until
then, and a corrosive, marginal, unforeseen, disidentifying aesthetic-literary program, which not only
demands that each work build internally its own rules, the rules of its language, but also presents
identities in crisis, incapable of relating to others, to the world, to language, to space, to history. In this
process of defamiliarization, the subject does not recognize itself as coinciding with whom it appears to
be, with whom it thinks it is, with the words it uses, and its interpretative universe, as well as the
meanings it seeks to build, begins to collapse. To read oneself is to recognize oneself as “anyone,” to
discover the precariousness upon which language and personal identity are structured; in short, it is to
assume the existential contingency, the ambivalence of signs, and the risk of losing oneself in the world.
That this “losing oneself in the world” ends up being converted into different aesthetic possibilities, that
the literature of the 20th century, in its various traditions, made very clear.
After all, is it not the dissolution of the self-centered subject and a writing that presents itself as a
question and deconstructive force that we constantly see in this literature of suppression? Examples
abound. In The Castle (1922): “And they were indeed walking on, but K. didn’t know where they were
going; he could make out nothing, [...]. The difficulty he had in simply walking meant that he could not
command his thoughts” (Kafka 28); in The Magic Mountain (1924): “They make pretty free with a human
being’s idea of time, up here. You wouldn’t believe it. Three weeks are just like a day to them. You’ll
learn all about it [...]. One’s ideas get changed” (Mann 41); in The Unnamable (1953): “Where now?
Who now? When now? Unquestioning. I, say I. Unbelieving. Questions, hypotheses (call them that).
Keep going, going on (call that going, call that on)” (Beckett 29); in Pedro Paramo (1955): “I came to
Comala because I was told that my father, a man called Pedro Paramo, was living there. It was what
my mother had told me, and I promised I would go and see him after she died. I assured her I would
do that” (Rulfo 25); in Água Viva (1973): “And I roll myself and as I roll on the floor I add myself in
leaves, I, anonymous work of an anonymous reality only justified while my life lasts” (Lispector 22).
The questions, doubts, and anxieties strike the characters and the narrative forms, make it difficult to
access the meanings of the work, disconnect the path from words to identities and, therefore, demand
from the reader a critical, creative attitude, which should be “authorial” of the object as well.
The “disincarnated” language is a language that, by suspending the peaceful path towards permanent
identities and identifications, and contesting the effects of voices on the familiar presence of the facts,
emancipates and migrates towards itself, or rather, demonstrates that literature can only act in the
world - transgress, denounce, reveal, inspire, etc. —through direct and inventive contact with a language
that resists, interrupts, and—according to the most recurrent formulations of a certain critic, sometimes
repeated like a mantra—disappears and dies before our eyes. “The word gives me the being, but it gives
it to me deprived of being. [...] Therefore it is accurate to say that when I speak, death speaks in me.
My speech is a warning that at this very moment death is loose in the world, that it has suddenly
appeared between me, as I speak, and the being I address” (Blanchot 323-324). The literary word
corresponds to the awareness of an absent presence, to the attempt to fill a gap that, however, in the
impossibility of becoming something concrete, carries with it the phantasmatic character of signs. Orphic
experience, literature, in short, evokes the real at the very moment it moves us away from it.
Celebrating the link between writing and disappearance, between the productive work of fabricating
language and the “negative” exercise of living with loss, means, of course, a challenge to thinking, now
freed from any rigid origin or point of final and repairing convergence—author, context, reception—for
the unpredictable adventure of an “endless conversation.” Literature performs the task of neutralizing
and refusing the supposed explanatory function, for example, of the author, a figure driven to death as
soon as the “here” and “now” of scripture is admitted: for “the modern scriptor [...], his hand, detached
from any voice, borne by a pure gesture of inscription (and not of expression), traces a field without
origin—or at least with no origin but language itself, i.e., the very thing which ceaselessly calls any
notion of origin into question” (Barthes 52). If it is true that this continuous celebration of multiplicity
as something “good in itself” also contributes significantly to the scenario of dismantling the notion of
artifact or work in literary studies—a fact that, in turn, has a direct participation in the developments
that lead to a therapeutic idea of literature and to a sliding notion of text, which assumes any friction or
obstruction as an imposing gesture against the free flow, “consumption” and “pleasure” of reading—the
“death of the Author” in fact breaks with the tradition, consolidated in several literature manuals, of
accessing the literary work through elements such as birth and death dates, or an a priori aesthetic
grammar, glued in an informative way to objects.
The “pleasure” or “bliss” of reading is still, at this moment, not the moral positivity of a restorative
writing that does justice to the world, that brings us closer to others, that makes us better than those
removed from the sacredness of the literary, or which allows us to have access to a revealing self-
knowledge, but a “restrictive” pleasure, linked, above all, to the operations of a language that can only
“unveil” the world by turning to itself and its particular constructions. The duty of “performing the
negative,” a fundamental aesthetic program of the 20th century announced by Kafka, finds resonance
in several other artists and theorists of negation: “Through the power with which Kafka commands
interpretation, he collapses aesthetic distance. He demands a desperate effort of the allegedly
‘disinterested’ observer of an earlier time, overwhelms him, suggesting that far more than his intellectual
equilibrium depends on whether he truly understands; life and death are at stake” (Adorno 245). Like
sleep (see Crary) and other creative and “unproductive” dimensions of human life, which cannot be
capitalized as commodities and placed in the flow of consumption, literature and the completeness of
the artistic artifact place a challenge to the reader's attention and the need for total surrender, without,
however, promising later reconciliation. The literary negativity reveals itself as an enigma and a
permanent requirement for re-reading: “What is enclosed in Kafka’s glass ball is even more monotonous,
more coherent and hence more horrible than the system outside [...]. Inwardness, revolving in itself
and devoid of all resistance, is denied all those things which might put a stop to its interminable
movement and which thus take on an aura of mystery” (Adorno 260-261).
The poetics of exhaustion and denial, far from acting under the principle of indistinct accumulation,
of continuous self-promotion in the fields of visibility, sometimes flirts dangerously with the extreme of
its own annihilation: starving artist, unable to find the food that would make him stuffed like everyone
else, Kafka asks his friend Max Brod to burn his writings after his death. Juan Rulfo, after the success
of Pedro Paramo, indefinitely postpones the publication of his second novel, always under unconvincing
pretexts: the death of his storytelling uncle, the excess of books in circulation. The literary burning
devised by Kafka was not unfamiliar to Rulfo: after receiving no response from the publishers, he decided
to eliminate his novel entitled The Son of Despondency, giving signs of the same refusal that would later
make him known. Robert Walser always considered himself a minor subject and also indulged in a long
silence, amidst endless and aimless walks, biographically incorporating the negative trajectory of his
characters: “Today, we will have to settle for absolutely nothing, shall we? Nothing is the fastest thing
to prepare and, in any case, it does not cause indigestion. Exceptionally, they [...] had absolutely nothing
to eat, and the husband [...] was not angry either, no way” (Walser 72). Vladimir Maiakovski, Horacio
Quiroga, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, Stefan Zweig, José María Arguedas, Primo Levi, Sylvia Plath,
Paul Celan, David Foster Wallace, Ana Cristina César, Torquato Neto—suicidal writers whose lives - not
always exemplary of a reparative ethics, it is worth remembering—are closer to expenditure, loss,
unproductivity, sacrifice, passion than to the preservative character of utility: “Every time the meaning
of a discussion depends on the fundamental value of the word useful—in other words, every time the
essential question touching on the lives of human societies is raised, no matter who intervenes and what
opinions are expressed—it is possible to affirm that the debate is necessarily warped and that the
fundamental question is eluded” (Bataille 116).
In any case, literature as negativity or expenditure seems to be linked to an era “to which we may
no longer belong,” or, in terms of our continuum, an era with which writers and their literary projects
no longer coincide. If “performing the negative” corresponded to the fundamental task of the 20th
century, today the legacy of the aesthetics of suppression, of the gesture of “undoing” the work,
increasingly points in the opposite direction: “The climate [...] clearly turns to the positivity of the
literary fact, which is located in the antipodes of the passion for the impossible that had animated
literature in the past. Programmatic positivity [...], in a climate of cultural competition in which the place
of literature as a sacred institution is compromised” (Rabaté, La Passion 235). The work without “work,”
that is, the textualization of artistic artifacts, now devoid of their opposing and tensioning dimension,
anticipates the scenario of a reception that, instead of being challenged or deconstructed, animates the
request for transitivity to objects: there is no time to lose, it is necessary to remedy the world. “Defining
the work in relation to the world, and not to literature, inscribing it in the logic of one’s own work and
that of the other, requiring it to provide substantial forms of historical or political knowledge [...] are
quite evident literary options” (Gefen 24). Without a totalizing purpose—and assuming that the scenario
here described is far from constituting a total or exclusive image of literature today—the next section
focuses on the analysis of some scenes or instances of the “therapeutic turn” here in question.
The Notion of Literary “Work” Undone

As previously mentioned, the study of specific cases drawn from the Brazilian context can be quite
revealing of the unfolding of this scenario in countries whose theoretical formulations tend to follow,
with singular local developments, the academic trends from the north of the globe. The transition from
the theoretical problems that historically defined the area of literature in Brazil as an academic discipline
to the recent attempts to give an ethical-restorative use to literary studies can be perceived through an
analysis of Brazilian post-graduate studies in the field of literature and its most recurring and recent
conceptual updates. More specifically, organized in lines of research that indicate the theoretical
perspectives of the professors and, consequently, of each post-graduate program, the landscape of post
graduate studies in the area of literature has undergone significant conceptual adjustments in the last
decades, pointing to the scenario here under discussion.
In the text entitled “Discussing the academic machine,” for example, Fabio Durão and Tauan Tinti
expose a conceptual tendency, within the scope of the research lines that integrate brazilian post-
graduate studies in the field of literature, symptomatic of the phenomenon here observed, that is, the
growing intention to use literary works in an ethical-reparative sense. In a selection of 105 Programs,
after the most evident occurrences of terms such as “literature” (88 Programs), and “culture” (55
Programs), “memory” appears as the fourth most frequent term in the research lines (28 Programs),
with only 3 occurrences less than the previous term, “history,” whose connection with literature
structures the area. Memory surpasses, according to the authors’ calculation, “the link traditionally
established between literature and society (23 occurrences) [...], the sum of lines aimed at modernity
(11 occurrences) and contemporaneity (13 occurrences) [...], and even the area of comparative
literature (16 occurrences) as a whole” (Durão and Tinti 98). The significant and growing appearance of
the concept in the lines linked to literature points to the harmony between the theoretical directions of
the area and a certain “fashion effect,” which tends to occur, as in the case of goods, in the center-
periphery sense.
Memory studies, in their most frequent formulations, aim to investigate “subject and body […] in
biographical and autobiographical writings,” “the articulations between lived experience, fiction and
social organization,” among others. 1 In the effective contact with literary artifacts, these lines are
1
Formulations extracted from two important graduate programs in the Brazilian context: the Graduate Program in
Literature at the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC) and the Graduate Program in Literary Studies at the
Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG).
roughly divided into two general trends. On the one hand, they are associated with trauma studies and
its categories—testimony, representation, violence, ruins—which attempt to examine different
narratives and documents linked to historical catastrophes, generally those of the 20th century (he
Holocaust and military dictatorships are the most frequent objects), and to the linguistic and testimonial
aporias that constitute them—references to Giorgio Agamben are frequent here. On the other hand,
they appear linked to the writing of biographies, autobiographies, autofictions and the operations of a
creative work that takes place at the “boundaries between the real and the fictional, placing at the
center of the discussions the possibility of the author’s return again” (Azevedo 31). The author
reappears, not as a regulating instance of the meanings of the text or the work, but as a problem around
the limits between the real and the fictional, which contributes to the reflection on what it means to
“unveil oneself,” “to write about one’s own life.” (Social media—twitter, facebook, instagram, whatsapp,
blogs, online forums and the like—appear as constant tools for the new literature and objects of critical
research, since they invite the author to function as a hybrid of reality and invention). In any case, what
is worth noting, in both trends, is the ethical-repairing effect that hovers over several of their
formulations:
How does the subject respond to radical loss? How does the process of mourning and melancholy work,
economically? What are the implications of the idea that the subject, in loss, becomes an archive of loss, a
site where the memory of loss and trauma is maintained in a kind of crypt? What would this archive look like?
(Boulter 3)
Autofiction is a project of self-exploration and self-experimentation on the part of the author. This in turn is
partly because many works of autofiction have been written in the aftermath of some kind of traumatic
experience—real or imagined—so that the process of writing in response to trauma can be seen as a means
of situating the self in a new context [...]. (Dix 4)
Literature would belong to a more or less voluntary psychotherapy, both for the author and the reader, who
can relive and repeat the emotions of the text internally. Illness in the romantic era, literature has become a
treatment, and the literary value is measured as to its therapeutic effectiveness, not only for those who cure
their traumas by verbalizing them, but also for the reader, who finds an appeasement in the book. (Gefen 98)
A Brazilian novel that crystallizes many of these trends—melancholy, private trauma, mourning, and
reparatory writing—is Cristóvão Tezza's award-winning The Eternal Son (2007). Since the initial
epigraphs, the volume announces the crossing and cancellation of the boundaries between fact and
creative construction—“We want to tell the truth, and yet we don't tell the truth. We describe something
seeking fidelity to the truth, and yet what is described is something other than the truth (Thomas
Bernhard)” —as well as the private, intimate, confessional or therapeutic impulse that produces an effect
of settling accounts with one’s life, reconciling with oneself and the world—“A son is like a mirror in
which the father beholds himself, and for the son, the father is too a mirror in which he beholds himself
in the time to come (Søren Kierkegaard)” —both characteristic features of the so-called autofiction. The
novel narrates the difficult journey of a teacher/writer father towards the acceptance of his son, Felipe,
with Down Syndrome, and his particular way of seeing the world. Although narrated in third person and
written in a dry language, which objectifies, at times to the extreme of coldness, the episodes and
subjects it deals with, Tezza’s book focuses on many of the experiences of the relationship between the
author himself and his son, also called Felipe and also with Down Syndrome.
If this fictionalized biography presents itself as the will to declare the truth and the impossibility of
simply doing it or of remaining in it for a long time, in a game of revelation and concealment, as
formulated by the first of Tezza's epigraphs, it is certain that media coverage of the book did not fail to
use the idea of a confession without concessions from the author as a marketing strategy for the
circulation of the book. In the front flap of its first edition, we read that, “In a courageous book, Cristovão
Tezza exposes the difficulties [...] of raising a child with Down syndrome. The author takes advantage
of the questions that appeared throughout the last 26 years to reorder his own life.” What we have here,
less than a characterization of the novel's autofictional uniqueness, is only the promise of revealing the
author's personal life and how he overcame his personal problems by means of a “life reordering”
writing. Despite the sophistication of theoretical assertions according to which autofiction plays with the
suspension of the limits between referentiality and creative exercise, in the curiosity of the public and
in market strategies, what often prevails is the biographical desire and the voyeuristic access to the
private, plus socialization of the healing power of self-writing. Likewise, despite the autofictional
strategies inscribed and aestheticized in the novel, what animates several of the questions asked to the
author in interviews is, not infrequently, a certain biographical-authorial intrusion:
[...] I was touching a hornet's nest when writing about it [a father with a special child]. At the same time, it
is a very personal book, in which I expose, or even open up my own life and feelings to readers; [...]
[Question] Because of all the academic production that exists on the work and the fact that the character in
the book is also called Felipe, how does your son Felipe feel? [Answer] He doesn't have the cognitive,
psychological perception to understand the complexity that is in the book. What he understands is that the
book is about him and, for him, this is wonderful in itself. (Tezza, Interview 237)
Although sometimes problematized (Damasceno), the mantra of confessional courage was

incorporated by criticism itself, which instead of focusing on the materiality and the specific work of
(auto)fictional writing, insists on the complexity of the theme and its delicate relationship with the
author’s biography as vestiges of an a-priori and, therefore, inevitable quality of the work. “Courage,”
“sensitivity,” “sincerity,” “cruelty,” “truth,” “shame,” among others, make up a critical and conceptual
framework that, in fact, is very close to the romantic-confessional vocabulary or to the reading of
biographies. The important question is the following: to what extent do the procedures announced by
the rich theoretical debate about autofiction actually migrate to a public reading of the genre as a set of
creative devices or fictional strategies (Damasceno)? Or do we remain here fundamentally in the domain
of the confessional, generating reading protocols that, instead of the concreteness of the artistic artifact
and its functioning, insert the biographical space as a catalyst for literary experience and a “restorative”
writing capable of arousing the reader’s curiosity?
In addition to the fictionalization of the self and the game of referential suspension, the so-called
self-fiction boom also seems to bring us to the heart of these issues, to that moment when literature
and literary criticism flirt closely with a therapeutic and healing language. Side by side with the artistic-
literary “function” or the condition of aesthetic artifact of objects, it is also necessary to attest or verify
an ethical-reparative project: being a hybrid exercise of canceling the boundaries between fact and
fiction, autofiction allows dealing with loss, healing personal wounds, purging trauma, filling in gaps,
generating empathy, giving visibility, undoing injustices, etc. If it is true that the constant reiteration of
the difficulty of establishing clear boundaries for the roles of author/narrator/character or for the
relationship between memory/truth/creation does not guarantee a critical and productive encounter with
the works themselves, the final validation for the analysis in many cases is decided by the ethical-
political dimension of their themes, or rather, by the possibility of, once again, revisiting the past,
opening space for alternative memories or reconciling with the world.
As a final decisive vector of this phenomenon, it is worth pointing out the current alignment between
autofictional literature and fictionalized exhibition of oneself, with literary intentions, that occurs on
social media. On places such as twitter, Facebook, Instagram, among others, creative impulses are
aligned with the immediacy of a reception that “likes,” “dislikes,” “follows” or “unfollows” according to
the stimulus criterion. Logically, this dynamic tends to place the intention of satisfying the reader in the
foreground, which ends up leading, once again, to therapeutic or, in this particular case, to self-help
discourse. The opening lines of a recent article in the newspaper Folha de São Paulo on the new
“Instagram writers” summarize the issue as follows: “Just as a cell phone is no longer made just for
calls, short stories and poems are no longer written just to be read. The reader needs to be pleased, to
make comments, to mark friends, to follow the author, and to watch his/her recommendations”
(Molinero). The same is true from the point of view of those who write: “[...] writers, of course, [...]
said goodbye to the world in which the only creative concern is the blank sheet - now it is necessary to
analyze metrics online, calculate reach, and study how to generate engagement and increase followers”
(Molinero). Unlike the productivity of critical discourse on autofiction and its most rigorous artifacts, the
confessed pragmatism stands out here, that is, the immediate continuity between writing, profession,
utility, and the economic sphere: “Success in social networks, in which they mobilize hundreds of
thousands of fans with weak, almost always sentimental and motivational texts, Instagram authors
increasingly make publishers’ eyes shine—and their pockets salivate” (Molinero).
Given the dynamics of conciseness and the intention of immediate effect characteristic of social
media, literature here moves towards compression and to increasingly shorter genres. The so-called
“twitterature,” for obvious reasons, restricts literary texts to the limit of 280 characters, which does not
necessarily mean “direct treatment” of the object or an “aesthetics of compression,” according to the
terms of an imagism that preaches economy and precision. Associated with the recent explosion of short
forms—micro-fiction, nano-fiction, micro-poems, flash-fiction, aphorisms, haiku—but without
necessarily maintaining the rigor of many of these, “twitterature,” among its formal peculiarities,
emerges with date of birth, time of posting, number of likes, retweets, etc. Thus, stuck in time and with
an “expiration date,” it constitutes a “literature of everyday facts,” which meets the needs and
interventions of the reader and then disappears. In the usual descriptions of the phenomenon, we read
the purpose of constantly “teaching” the reader, “learning” with the reader and, more importantly,
stimulating a network of followers, using, if necessary, market strategies: “as a marketing vehicle,
twitterature can raise established authors to new heights [...]. Ephemeral or not, tweets ‘teach,’
informing both new and old authors about how to reach and attract readers” (Rudin).
But the fictionalized construction of the authorial identity and the subsequent games of
presence/absence, truth/construction, exposure/concealment is just one of the different portraits
assumed by ethical-reparative production today. It is worth observing the theoretical scope of this trend
as crystallized by the so-called “ethical turn” in literary studies. Now, if the link between ethics and
literature is historical and also constitutive of the field, as the famous book X of the Republic of Plato
reminds us, the “ethical turn” is often confused today with the totality of literary criticism, mainly
through the mediating mechanism of studies: “animal studies,” “queer studies,” “post-human studies,”
“visual studies,” “adaptation studies,” etc. The fundamental premise, which may unite the different
developments and particularities of these different studies, is that literature is a privileged place for
discussions on ethical decisions regarding different forms of hierarchies and exclusions that take place
in our society (Culler). In a book on this theme, editors Todd Davis and Kenneth Womack present the
“ethical turn” in the following terms:
Part of being human involves the daily struggle with the meanings and consequences of our actions, a struggle
most often understood in narrative structures as we tell others and ourselves about what has transpired or
what we fear will transpire in the future. As creatures driven by story; we find ourselves immersed in narrative
in almost every aspect of our lives. [...] In the end, if there is any single defining characteristic in the ethical
turn that marks contemporary literary studies, it resides in the fact that few critics wish to return to a
dogmatically prescriptive or doctrinaire form of reading. (Davis and Womack ix-x).
The brief preface to the book, however, admits that the “ethical turn” constitutes less a consistent
set of theoretical-critical positions towards the literary than a desire to refuse “dogmatically prescriptive
or doctrinaire forms of reading” through the encounter or confrontation with controversial issues and
the power of narratives of “changing our lives” (Davis and Womack x). In other words, the opening
offered by the “ethical turn” occurs mainly in the thematic field, and this is where the device of studies
is inserted in a scheme capable of being updated ad nauseam, under the risk of working in service of a
similar “fashion effect”: themes emerge, inform the artifacts, form an area (“x” studies), and then fall
into disuse. From the point of view of criticism and the encounter with works, on the one hand, in their
most effective analytical procedure, the studies are also affected by the objects they encounter, in an
unpredictable and mutually contagious exercise, which does not silence the immanence or singularity of
the literary. On the other hand, in the worst scenario, we notice what Fabio Durão observes in the essay
entitled “Brazilian Academic-Literary Stupidity”: “Articles written in order to mobilize certain fashionable
terms” [...]; theories applied to the most diverse (and disparate) objects” (Durão, Burrice 31). In the
latter case, reading becomes a mechanical and predictable exercise, without much dialogue with the
possibly disconcerting knowledge of the specificity that each artifact brings with it.
In any case, what calls attention in the “ethical turn” is the frequent announcement and celebration
of the “curative,” “beneficial,” “political” and “enlightening” power of literature, a thesis whose circularity
and reiteration—for example, in the aforementioned volume (Davis and Womack)—denote anguish in
the face of a possible “emptiness” or expenditure in literary reading, or else of its possible uselessness,
which seems to hover over the ethical-reparative argument as a constant threat. It is as if the promise
of learning from literature occupied a foreground in relation to the practice of criticism and texts that in
fact may or may not—it is only possible to affirm it after the reading test—“teach” something through
its particular operations and its specific constitution. Bringing animals and humans closer together,
raising awareness of the otherness of nature, reliving traumas and remembering the past from another
perspective, recognizing and accepting differences, questioning binary oppositions, reconstructing
oneself fictionally, in short, repairing the world: the ethical machinery readjusts and expands its reach
to the extent that human conflicts are confirmed and modified, in order to pragmatically and politically
justify the relevance of literature and literary studies. It is precisely as a therapeutic space and repository
of alterities that Todorov reiterates the privileged place of a creative activity now “in danger”: “Literature
can do a lot. It can reach out to us when we are deeply depressed, bring us even closer to other human
beings around us, make us better understand the world, and help us live. Not that it is, above all, a soul
care technique; however, a revelation of the world, it can also, in its course, transform each of us from
within” (76).
Where these ethical-reparative positions are mostly present—emptied, however, of the complexity
of the theoretical debate—is, in fact, in Basic Education and in the official documents that define the
place for teaching literature in school curricula. In the final version of the Brazilian National Common
Core, dated 2018, individual improvement, self-expression, recognition of otherness, and “protagonism
and authorship in personal and collective life” (Brazil 9) are mixed in a confused whole which, in the
end, only dissolves any solidity linked to the literary in the name of the same discourse of formative
flexibility that dominates the other lines of the document. In order to fill the empty space left by the
crisis of previous principles that until recently organized the teaching of literature, and due to the alleged
elitism, partiality and arrogance of the western canon - operators that until recently justified the
presence of literature in schools - the BNCC makes use of an ethical assumption not at all dissimilar
from that previously seen. The literary image, however, is stretched to the point of fitting any narrative
form and textual genre, now accompanied by a parade of technologies and social media. Moreover, it is
worth highlighting the appearance of creative writing as a skill to be developed for the promotion of
self-knowledge: “At this stage [High School], a more systematic work with literary writing is also at
stake, the poetic writing, whose work is slow and demands selections and experiments with content and
varied linguistic resources, in view of an interlocutor. Thus, such choices can function as a process of
self-knowledge, by mobilizing ideas, feelings and emotions” (Brazil 523-524).
[Skill] Produce appreciative and critical presentations and comments on books, films, records, songs, theater
and dance shows, exhibitions, etc. (literary and artistic reviews, vlogs and podcasts, commented playlists,
fanzines, e-zines etc.). (Brazil 526)
[Skill] Create authorial works, in different genres and media - through the selection and appropriation of
textual and expressive resources from the artistic repertoire -, and/or derived productions (parodies,
stylizations, fanfics, fanclips, etc.), as a way to dialogue critically and/or subjectively with the literary text.
(526)
The technological novelties that accompany and justify the literary in the BNCC only reveal an
uncomfortable or unwanted opposite element, that is, the insufficiency or even disposability of the area
if taken as an end in itself, if dissociated from a scheme of means and ends that provide it with a
regulatory ethical-formative sense. Although such a sense is, after all, desirable, here it is constituted
against the grain or “on the back” of objects and forms historically associated with literature, dissolving
or evaporating them amid a profusion of genres and technologies that, strictly speaking, have a very
unstable life. What we see in the new BNCC is an expanded concept of literature that flirts dangerously
with its own dissolution and disposal, which, in this case, has an immediate and evident consequence:
literary studies become a pre-theoretical mix of creative writing, “media studies” and “discourse genres,”
a hybrid devoid of any trace of its past and memory, but which insists on dragging with it a name that
no longer seems to fit.
Final Remarks
The desire to “repair the world”—to recall the title of Alexandre Gefen's book one last time—gives
literature an objective and noble purpose that, strictly speaking, contrasts considerably both with the
recurrent diagnosis of its eventual end, and with the tradition of literary exhaustion and suppression
throughout the 20th century. In any case, at a time clearly defined by the deep dispute or competition
between different textualities, media and genres in the field of visibility of culture, literature is obliged,
on the one hand, to broaden its concept to include all this as proto-literary expressions or current
reconfigurations of its field, and, on the other, to enter the positive space of contemporary pragmatism,
under the threat of disappearing as a form from institutional spaces. In this sense, understanding the
work of literature as that of remedying, restoring, giving visibility, doing justice, remembering, etc. is
something that gives the area, of course, an air of profound revitalization, assuring it some unforeseen
prominence.
What is worth considering—and that was the main purpose of this essay—is that the ethical-
reparative principle of use corresponds in part to the neutralization of another possible “use” for the
literary, that is to say, its politics of denial and intransitivity, which, interestingly, would have a no less
important role to play at the present moment. In other words, understanding that literature and its
teaching are intransitive (Durão, “Da Intransitividade”), that there is nothing that literature directly
instrumentalizes as an effect of its operations or (de)constructive conduct, does not imply that it has no
relevance or no ethical-formative dimension. Now, if it is true that contemporaneity is marked by the
sign of competition, the culture of the self, the incessant search for stimuli, the politics of effect,
transparency, and fake news, etc., the “unproductiveness” of literature could be linked to introspection,
silence, slowness, and other negative forms whose “uselessness” today takes on dramatic and radical
contours. However, following Debord’s diagnosis (16-17) of the democratic language of the spectacle -
“what appears is good, what is good appears”—one question remains important: amid so much noise,
how to point out the relevance and defend the fundamental place of that which moves silently, almost
unseen, towards its own disappearance?
Note: Work for this article was supported by The National Social Science Fund of China, grant number
16BZW012.
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Author Profile: André Cechinel is Professor of Literary Theory and Education at the University of the Extreme South
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Literatura, Ensino e formação em Tempos de Teoria (com T maiúsculo) (2020), among others. Email:
<andrecechinel@gmail.com>

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CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Volume 23 (2021) Issue 2 Article 7

Ethical-Reparative Reconfigurations of the Literary Today

Follow this and additional works at: https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Volume 23 Issue 2 (June 2021) Article 7

Contents of CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 23.2 (2021)

Ethical Reparative Reconfigurations of the Literary Today

Undoing the Notion of Literary “Work”

The Notion of Literary “Work” Undone

Although sometimes problematized (Damasceno), the mantra of confessional courage was

Todorov, Tzvetan. A Literatura em Perigo. Translated by Caio Meira, Difel, 2009.

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